"Pulse was not just a gay club, it was a place of solidarity," a man yelled from the top of a stoop next to the Stonewall Inn. Hundreds repeated his words back to him in unison.

"A gay bar is the first place I learned to be me. A queer club is the first place I saw people that looked like me," he said, motioning to the Stonewall Inn.

"A gay bar started a revolution," he concluded to cheers.

The Stonewall Inn was the site of the 1969 Stonewall riots, a series of days-long violent protests that erupted after police raided the gay bar, attacking the patrons. It helped to spark the LGBT rights movement.

The shooter called 911 shortly before the shooting and pledged allegiance to the leader of ISIS, though there has been no official confirmation that he was trained or ordered by the Islamic State to carry out the attacks.

Ema O'Connor

Ema O'Connor

In the late afternoon a crowd of queer people and their allies began to gather outside of Stonewall Inn, drawn to the cradle of the LGBT movement to express their grief.

People held signs reading "NRA = Death," "Not afraid," and "We Are Orlando."

Some attendees hoisted their young children onto their shoulders, some put their arms around their parents.

One young woman stood alone in the crowd crying. A stranger approached her and hugged her before introducing themselves.

"These kinds of spaces are almost like our church," a young woman named Jackie told BuzzFeed News, referring to queer bars like Stonewall and Pulse.

"It's places like these that I can go high-femme with my girlfriend. We can kiss each other and the only reaction that we would probably get is, 'Go girl!' No one would ask to watch, no one would leer at us," Jackie said. "It's a place we can go to be ourselves, to be free.

"For someone to cross that line, to violate that sacred space is truly abhorrent. I feel scared and sad and angry and frustrated," she said.

Many other people at the vigil echoed Jackie's feelings, saying that spaces like Pulse are, for many LGBT Americans, one of the only places they can feel safe.

To have that taken away so suddenly "feels like having the carpet ripped out from under us," one man, who declined to give his name, told BuzzFeed News as he held his young daughter on one hip.

"We were doing so well," he said, "everything was looking better for us in these past few years— but now..."

During a moment of silence to honor the victims of the attack, many held each other, kissed, and cried.